Soft shades of various general types are known. These include Austrian, Balloon, Pleated Balloon, Roman, Cloud, Smocked and Deco Fold shades. Prior art soft shade systems either employ multiple rods, special head or rod arrangements and/or complicated construction and installation. Prior art raisable soft curtains often require four or more spaced-apart mountings to the wall or window frame. Complicated construction of such shades often precludes the average homemaker from making a soft shade at home. Some of the soft shades sold for home assembly employ temporary expedients, such as velcro hook and loop fasteners, which must be glued to a rod and must be replaced over time, especially after cleaning or washing the shade.
Examples of prior proposed soft shade systems include those described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,593,772, 3,528,477 and 4,501,311, which require special heading provisions. U.S. Pat. No. 3,952,788, which discloses another curtain system, is complicated and not suitable for home construction. U.S. Pat. No. 4,739,815, while perhaps capable of easy construction, suffers from drawbacks in that its lock or latch for its pull cords may not be easily used by a short person or on a tall window and that it requires relatively strong fabric for its curtain to resist stresses in raising and holding up the curtain, and suffers from the requirement that it uses hook and loop fasteners to prevent lateral shifting of its curtain during rising.
Other U.S. patents of possible interest include U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,777,800 and 4,245,688.
There exists a need in this art for an easily made raisable soft curtain which may be used with many different types of curtain fabric without unduly stretching or tearing them and which is easy to make and is easy to to mount on, for example, the conventional curtain rod.